Astrophysicists Announce Major Discovery Of Big Bang's Smoking Gun

Scientists have found the first direct evidence that the universe
expanded incredibly quickly in the microseconds after the Big
Bang.

This is ground-breaking and Nobel-Prize-worthy research, if it is
confirmed by other researchers.

They found these signatures of cosmic inflation are gravitational
waves in the cosmic microwave background radiation of our
universe. Gravitational waves created by the Big Bang rippled
through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth
called inflation — when the universe expanded by 100 trillion
trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

Actually, it's much quicker than a blink of an
eye: Specifically, 10^-34 second, or a decimal point
followed by 33 zeroes and a 1.

That inflation happened about
13.82 billion years ago, as the universe expanded from
nothingness to the vastness of space as we see it today:

"This work offers new insights into some of our most basic
questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?,"
astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wasn't a member of the study team
said in a statement about the Harvard-Smithsonian research.
"These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they
also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the
process was."

A groundbreaking discovery

Here's the kind of data they were working with, this image of the
cosmic microwave background radiation from the Plank
telescope:From theoretical analyses and theories, they figured that
signatures from the gravitational waves created by the big bang
would be visible in this kind of data. According
to Nature News:

Cosmologists knew, however, that inflation would have a
distinctive signature: the brief but violent period of expansion
would have generated gravitational waves, which compress space in
one direction while stretching it along another. Although the
primordial waves would still be propagating across the Universe,
they would now be too feeble to detect directly. But they would
have left a distinctive mark in the CMB: they would have
polarized the radiation in a curly, vortex-like pattern known as
the B mode.

They saw some signals of this B-mode before in the cosmic
microwave data above, but they were extremely faint.

The researchers developed the BICEP2 detector at the south
pole to gather their new data. According
to NASA, they had to create a unique array of detectors,
which work like the pixels in digital cameras but can detect how
light is polarized. The system operates at just 0.45 degrees
Fahrenheit above the lowest temperature achievable, absolute
zero.

With this ultra sensitive detector, they were able to detect this
B-mode signature at
a five-sigma significance: the standard significance to
declare a discovery of this magnitude.

Why it's significant

The information derived from this new gravity wave data will give
us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into
existence. Gravitational waves were the last untested prediction
of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The BICEP2
researchers were analyzing data from the early universe to find
the signals of these waves.

The data they've announced today is even better, because it's is
so strong it rules out many theories, according to
Scientific American's Clara Moskowitz, who writes "the signal
is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a
large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way
toward new theories of physics, experts say."

Though the signal is strong and everyone's excited, there are
still reasons not to get ahead of ourselves. This new data will
need to be scrutinized by other scientists and confirmed by other
experiments.